Date and Time
May 5, 2011
7:30 PM - 9:00 PM

Availability
Open to the public
No RSVP required

Trimpin discusses his year-long Stanford residency and his new work which combines kinetic musical sculpture with emotionally-powerful WWII history.

As a youth in southwestern Germany in the 1950s, Gerhard Trimpin (as he was then known) was haunted by the fact that, in the Nazi era, the Jews from his town had all been deported to the internment camp at Gurs, near the Spanish-French border. Decades later, Trimpin worked with maverick composer Conlon Nancarrow, who revealed that he, too, had been interned at Gurs-during the Spanish Civil War. More recently, a 2006 New Yorker profile of Trimpin mentioned this Gurs connection. Trimpin was contacted shortly thereafter by Victor Rosenberg, a descendant of a family interned at Gurs, who, having read the article, offered the artist the use of more than 200 of his family's letters mailed from the camp. These and other elements, united by history, profound coincidence, and the power of Trimpin's imagination, come together in a unique multimedia stage performance, The Gurs Zyklus, that will be presented by Stanford Lively Arts on Saturday, May 14.

This event is sponsored by the Aurora Forum.

For more information, please visit Stanford's Ethics and War Series webstie.